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In this book, Conrad Rudolph studies and reconstructs Hugh of St. Victor's forty-two-page written work, The Mystic Ark, which describes the medieval painting of the same name. In medieval written sources, works of art are not often referred to, let alone described in any detail. Almost completely ignored by art historians because of the immense difficulty of its text, Hugh of Saint Victor's Mystic Ark (c. 1125-1130) is among the most unusual sources we have for an understanding of medieval artistic culture. Depicting all time, all space, all matter, all human history, and all spiritual striving, this highly polemical painting deals with a series of cultural issues crucial in the education of society's elite during one of the great periods of intellectual change in Western history.
The legends of King Arthur have not only endured for centuries, but also flourished in constant retellings and new stories built around the central themes. With the coming of motion pictures, Arthur was destined to hit the screen. This edition of Cinema Arthuriana, revised in 2002, presents 20 essays on the topic of the recurring presence of the legend in film and television from 1904 to 2001. They cover such films as Excalibur (1981) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), television productions such as The Mists of Avalon (2001), and French and German films about the quest for the Holy Grail and the other adventures of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
An encounter between a warring knight and the world of learning could seem a paradox. It is nonetheless related with the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, an essential intellectual movement for western history. Knights not only fought in battles, but also moved in sophisticated courts. Knights were interested in Latin classics, and reading and writing poetry. Supportive of ?jongleurs? and minstrels, they enjoyed literary conversations with clerics who would attempt to reform their behaviour, which was often brutal. These lettered warriors, while improving their culture, learned to repress their own violence and were initiated to courtesy: selective language, measured gestures, elegance in dress, ...
The Saturated Sensorium is a book about the senses and their media in the Middle Ages: a book about what it meant to sense and perceive something. The book highlights the integrated and unified nature of medieval senses and media. It discusses the inter- and multi-mediality of cultic and cultural artefacts as well as the sensorial and inter-sensorial dimensions of a wide array of cultural concepts and practices within medieval religion, art, archaeology, architecture, literature, music, food, social life, ritual, devotion, cognition, and memory. These domains of sensory and media history are dealt with, not as isolated anthology articles in only loose connection with one another, but as coor...
The Bibles Moralisées are by far the richest and most complex attempt at biblical illustration ever undertaken. Seven of them survive today, made primarily for the kings and queens of France between the early thirteenth and late fifteenth centuries. John Lowden's pioneering two-volume study brings new material to light and offers a wholly new approach to understanding the Bibles, which contain literally thousands of figures. Volume I, based on exhaustive codicological analysis, considers the making and the later history of use of each of the manuscripts. Volume II investigates in detail the treatment of one portion of the Bible, the Book of Ruth, in all the manuscripts. Discussion is supported by many new photographs in color and black and white. Together the two volumes challenge conventional wisdom about both the Bibles Moralisées and the relationship of word and image in medieval culture.
The diffusion of personal signs of identity during the twelfth century introduced individuals to mediated forms of communication. The book analyses the conditions for and the implications of their partnering with material signs and images in expressing self and accountability.
What do the physical characteristics of the books acquired by elite women in the late medieval and early modern periods tell us about their owners, and what in particular can their illustrations—especially their illustrations of women—reveal? Centered on Anne, duchess of Brittany and twice queen of France, with reference to her contemporaries and successors, The Queen's Library examines the cultural issues surrounding female modes of empowerment and book production. The book aims to uncover the harmonies and conflicts that surfaced in male-authored, male-illustrated works for and about women. In her interdisciplinary investigation of the cultural and political legacy of Anne of Brittany ...
The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity takes as its subject the beliefs, practices, and institutions of the Christian Church between 400 and 1500AD. It addresses topics ranging from early medieval monasticism to late medieval mysticism, from the material wealth of the Church to the spiritual exercises through which certain believers might attempt to improve their souls. Each chapter tells a story, but seeks also to ask how and why "Christianity" took particular forms at particular moments in history, paying attention to both the spiritual and otherwordly aspects of religion, and the material and political contexts in which they were often embedded. This Handbook is a landmark academic ...